What Lee's `Life of Pi' Oscar Says of Chinese Film

Feb 26, 2013 5:44 PM EST

Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- The Oscars began at 9:30 a.m. on
Monday in China. By 10 a.m., “Oscars” was the top trending topic
on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular Twitter-like microblog. And
by lunchtime, a mild controversy emerged.

The inadvertent perpetrator was Ang Lee, the Taiwanese-American director of “Life of Pi.” Upon receiving his second
best-director award (he first won in 2005 for “Brokeback
Mountain”), Lee offered what in Hollywood must have sounded like
an innocuous acceptance speech, but in China and Taiwan it held
deeper meaning. He thanked everyone from the “movie god” to his
producers. Then he added:

“I cannot make this movie without the help of Taiwan. We
shot there. I want to thank everybody there helped us.
Especially the city of Taichung.”

Lee made no mention of China -- even though China claims
Taiwan as a renegade province and tensions run high between them
-- but he did end his speech by thanking the audience in Chinese
(as well as English and Sanskrit). Was his omission of China
deliberate? It’s impossible to say. (Curiously, Lee thanked
China after he won in 2005.)

In Taiwan and among Taiwanese, the response to Lee’s win
and acceptance speech has been rapturous. On Monday, the mayor
of Taichung announced that Lee will be named an honorary citizen
of the city; that night Lee’s name was emblazoned in lights atop
the Taipei 101 building. Taiwanese users of Sina Weibo tweeted
hundreds, if not thousands, of declarations of Taiwanese pride;
this was all but unprecedented on the site, where the politics
run very strongly in favor of Chinese sovereignty claims --
especially when it comes to Taiwan. Shortly after the broadcast,
Hu Caipin, a self-identified Taiwanese in Beijing, tweeted:

“Ang Lee, in his acceptance speech, mentioned several times
that the film was shot in Taiwan. That such a small island can
draw the attention of the whole world makes me cry tears of joy.
We’re forbidden to hang our national flag in public places, to
sing our national anthem, and we can’t even mention the Republic
of China. So at a time like this Taiwanese have a special
feeling in their hearts that only Taiwanese can understand. I am
proud of being a Taiwanese.”

Ordinarily, such a tweet might have provoked heaping abuse
from Chinese microbloggers. Indeed, a brief look at the more
than 1,600 comments left below the tweet uncovers plenty of
reminders that Taiwan is not a country. Still, the Chinese
response is unexpectedly low-key. Many Chinese microbloggers are
either joining the celebration or wondering why a Chinese
national -- rather than an ethnic Chinese, like Lee -- is not
the two-time winner of what is arguably the most coveted
directing award in film.

There’s no shortage of tweets embracing Lee as “the pride
of the Chinese people,” and “the pride of Chinese film.”
However, this patriotic cheerleading has its detractors.
Tengjing Shu, a Shanghai-based film critic, summarized her
objections in a lengthy mid-afternoon tweet:

“A journalist asked me what kind of influence Life of Pi
and its four awards will have on Chinese film. I said that it
was irrelevant to China. The awards, and the fact that Life of
Pi was shot in Taiwan, only serve to highlight problems with
Chinese filmmaking.”

What are those problems with Chinese filmmaking? An hour
after the Oscars broadcast ended, Wang Ran, co-founder and chief
executive officer of China eCapital Corp., a Beijing-based
investment bank, offered what has become a fashionable answer:
He pointed at the much-hated State Administration of Radio, Film
and Television, China’s chief media industry regulator and
censor. Tweeting to his 2.6 million Sina Weibo followers, Wang
complained:

“On the same day that ethnic Chinese director Lee Ang won
another Oscar, SARFT announced regulations requiring that
Chinese TV documentaries should pass a review just as movies and
TV dramas do. While other people merely enjoy the excitement
provided by Hollywood, only SARFT takes practical steps to help
Hollywood maintain its dominant status in global film.”

Wang’s chronology was incorrect -- the new documentary rule
was issued on Feb. 22 -- but his concern that China’s highly
regulated film and television industry inhibits creativity and
international success was not. In the hours since Lee’s win,
thousands of Chinese microbloggers have used their accounts to
bemoan the censorship, reviews and political expectations that
reduce many fine Chinese directors to little more than court
filmmakers.

Examples of such filmmakers are well-known in China, with
none so significant as Zhang Yimou, best known today as the
director of the 2008 Olympic opening ceremonies, several high-budget kung fu films, and at least one certifiably awful attempt
(2011’s “The Flowers of War”) to please the sensibilities of
both the members of the Academy (it was not selected as a
nominee, even in the Foreign Film category) and the
sensibilities of Communist Party officials who support him. Yet,
as any Chinese film fan knows, before he became the party’s
favorite filmmaker, Zhang was the critically acclaimed,
sometimes banned, director of the first Chinese film to be
nominated for an Oscar in the foreign film category for 1990’s
“Ju Dou.”

This week, though, that rebellious Zhang is little more
than a fond memory, at least in the realm of Chinese social
media. His career trajectory has been compared repeatedly and
unfavorably to that of Ang Lee. Fairly or unfairly, the
Taiwanese director has become the exemplar of artistic
filmmaking, and the once-celebrated Chinese national has become
a symbol of someone trapped by the expectations of higher-ups
who seek only awards -- and don’t win them -- and care little
for the art itself. A gentle version of this critique was
offered after the awards by a Chinese national living in the
U.S., who tweeted via Sina Weibo (in Chinese):

“My husband and I say Ang Lee has a story that he wants to
tell and then he makes the movie, while Zhang Yimou guesses what
the judges want to see in order to cater to audience tastes.
There’s more than a little difference.”

In contrast to the criticism, the Chinese state media has
greeted Lee’s win with warmth and extensive coverage.
Nonetheless, not every news outlet and commentator is
sympathetic to the negative portrayal of China’s filmmakers and
their masters. On Tuesday, the ultranationalist, state-owned
Global Times newspaper published an opinion piece by Zhang Yiwu,
a Peking University professor, which defended the work of
Chinese filmmakers while suggesting that Lee’s career trajectory
-- from small independent films to big-budget award-winners --
can be instructive. But as so often happens these days in China,
Zhang saved his most interesting thoughts for a tweet, which he
posted to Sina Weibo on Tuesday. He takes aim at Chinese and
others who would malign Chinese filmmakers, especially in
comparison to Ang Lee:

“Some take Ang Lee as an example and say that mainland
Chinese are incompetent, which is bigoted. Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize
is far more important than the best director award, and it
leaves some people extremely unhappy. They never stop scolding
and they fear that the Chinese people will win. Because of the
extreme rigidity of their ideology, they are unwilling to
appreciate different kinds of works.”

This kind of talk -- and tweet -- doesn’t have much appeal
in China outside of state bureaucracies. Meanwhile at the box
office, Chinese filmgoers have spent more than $90 million on
Ang Lee’s film, exceeding the receipts of almost all Chinese-made films released in 2012. Unlike the Oscars, that’s an award
given by the Chinese people themselves.

(Adam Minter, the Shanghai correspondent for the World View
blog, is writing “Junkyard Planet,” a book on the global
recycling industry. The opinions expressed are his own.)